It is generally well known in the art to cover electrical outlets with protective outlet covers to prevent unwanted tampering, especially by babies and young children, and, for outdoor outlets, for purposes of weatherproofing the outlet.
The outdoor cover designs include box shaped structures surrounding the outlet or cover plate implementations, which are offered with a variety of miniature spring-loaded doors covering the individual sockets. The miniature doors are provided so that they slide or pivot out of the way to accommodate an electrical cord to be plugged into the outlet.
The same concept of a cover plate has been extended into the interior of the home as a child safety device. Some of these designs also offer the ability to retain an electrical plug in the outlet. Installation of these devices, most often requires the removal of the existing outlet plate and its replacement with one having an integrated protective device. These types of covers tend to be expensive since they are manufactured as a series of assembled components and require removal and discard of the existing outlet plate.
For interior outlets there are also products that work with the individual sockets in an outlet. Many of these designs consist of a cover and some type of prongs for engaging and holding the plug into the outlet. These prongs are typically sized to work like the prongs on an electrical plug and engage the electrical contacts inside the outlet to hold the cover in place. These are very well known in the art and consist mainly of a plastic faceplate in the shape of an outlet, having two plastic prongs extending therefrom which are designed to engage the outlet in the two rectangular slots. None of these devices have the ability to retain an electrical plug in the outlet.
Although the use of these types of safety devices do not require the replacement of the existing outlet plate, they only rely on the application of force in one direction for removal. Further, these types of safety devices do not have a positive locking feature. Therefore, once a child understands how to pull on them, they tend to remove them out of curiosity, thereby attracting them to the very thing they are being guarded from. Because these types of cover plugs are easy to remove, and lack a positive locking feature, they have traditionally been manufactured in material and shapes that do not suggest to children that they are objects of attention.
Other designs have improved on this idea and have provided more complicated devices. One such design is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,699,050 to Wong, et al., in which a barbed, spring-loaded prong engages the ground hole of the outlet. The prong and the sliding mechanism are encased in a protective plastic housing that covers the remaining slots in the outlet when the device is in place. Another design is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,024,603, which discloses a device having barbed prongs and a locking mechanism. Both of these designs, however, suffer from the disadvantage of being relatively complicated and comprise multiple parts, requiring assembly, making them relatively expensive to manufacture.
Therefore there is a need to have an outlet protection device, an electrical plug retainer, and an electrical device retainer that does not require the removal of an existing outlet plate due to the expensive nature of the cost of removal and replacement.
There is also a further need for an outlet protection device, an electrical plug retainer and an electrical device retainer that can be manufactured as a single component or as a small assembly to reduce the cost of manufacture.
In addition, it is desirable to have an outlet protection device, an electrical plug retainer, and an electrical device retainer that requires force to be applied simultaneously in two different directions to increase the complexity of removal of the device from the outlet. Similarly, it is desirable to have an outlet protection device and an electrical plug retainer that includes a positive safety lock not allowing the device to be removed without some type of activation force.
There is still yet a need for protecting access to the electrical prongs of an electrical device in an outlet to avoid human contact with the prongs by retaining the prongs in the outlet or containing them at the outlet.
Lastly, it is desirable to have an outlet protection device, an electrical plug retainer and an electrical device retainer which can be manufactured with colors or designs, which are attractive and decorative while still maintaining their safe utility.